The Insider News

The Insider News is for breaking IT and Software development news. Post your news, your alerts and
your inside scoops. This is an IT news-only forum - all off-topic, non-news posts will be
removed. If you wish to ask a programming question please post it
here.

Get The Daily Insider direct to your mailbox every day. Subscribe
now!

The Google "Fun Propulsion Labs" team has recently open-sourced FlatBuffers. Built especially to support performance needs of game developers, FlatBuffers stores serialized data in buffers which can be either stored in files or transferred across the network as-is, without any parsing overhead.

Google "Fun Propulsion Labs"? I think I just threw up a little in my mouth.

Our own Wong Shao Voon[^] was a customer of CodeSpaces and lost all. A few hours before I read the memo on the home page (as now it's down) and it was clear that they have no off-site backup and the whole thing is gone for good...

I'm not questioning your powers of observation; I'm merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is. (V)

Seeing as their webpage is dead, I had it still open on my tablet from earlier. Here is the text;

Code Spaces : Is Down!

Dear Customers,

On Tuesday the 17th of June 2014 we received a well orchestrated DDOS against our servers, this happens quite often and we normally overcome them in a way that is transparent to the Code Spaces community. On this occasion however the DDOS was just the start.

An unauthorised person who at this point who is still unknown (All we can say is that we have no reason to think its anyone who is or was employed with Code Spaces) had gained access to our Amazon EC2 control panel and had left a number of messages for us to contact them using a hotmail address

Reaching out to the address started a chain of events that revolved arount the person trying to extort a large fee in order to resolve the DDOS.

Upon realisation that somebody had access to our control panel we started to investigate how access had been gained and what access that person had to the data in our systems, it became clear that so far no machine access had been achieved due to the intruder not having our Private Keys.

At this point we took action to take control back of our panel by changing passwords, however the intruder had prepared for this and had already created a number of backup logins to the panel and upon seeing us make the attempted recovery of the account he proceeded to randomly delete artifacts from the panel. We finally managed to get our panel access back but not before he had removed all EBS snapshots, S3 buckets, all AMI's, some EBS instances and several machine instances.

In summary, most of our data, backups, machine configurations and offsite backups were either partially or completely deleted.

This took place over a 12 hour period which I have condensed into this very brief explanation, which I will elaborate on more once we have managed our customers needs.

Data Status

All svn repositories that had the following url structure have been deleted from our live EBS's and all backups and snapshots have been deleted:
https://[ACCOUNT].codesapces.com/svn/[REPONAME]

All Svn repositoies using the following url format are still available for export but all backups and snapshots have been deleted:
https://svn.codespaces.com/[ACCOUNT]/[REPONAME]

All Git repositories are available for export but all backups and snapshots have been deleted

All Code Spaces machines have been deleted except some old svn nodes and one git node.

All EBS volumes containing database files have been deleted as have all snapshots and backups.

Code Spaces Status

Code Spaces will not be able to operate beyond this point, the cost of resolving this issue to date and the expected cost of refunding customers who have been left without the service they paid for will put Code Spaces in a irreversible position both financially and in terms of on going credibility.

As such at this point in time we have no alternative but to cease trading and concentrate on supporting our affected customers in exporting any remaining data they have left with us.

All that we can say at this point is how sorry we are to both our customers and to the people who make a living at Code Spaces for the chain of events that lead us here.

In order to get any remaining data exported please email us at support[at]codespaces.com with your account url and we will endeavour to process the request as soon as possible.

On behalf of everyone at Code Spaces, please accept our sincere apologies for the inconvenience this has caused to you, and ask for your understanding during this time! We hope that one day we will be able to and reinstate the service and credibility that Code Spaces once had!

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.-John Q. AdamsYou must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering.-Wernher von BraunOnly two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-Albert Einstein

Facebook has built its own networking switch and developed a Linux-based operating systems to run it. The goal is to create networking infrastructure that mimics a server in terms of how its managed and configured.

When they fix the ability to do any type of audio mixing, or add support for mufti-channel audio... maybe.
Until then unless you want to choose between having background audio OR effects, not worth it.

There are some workarounds and frameworks, but they all have serious issues for anything beyond the most simple audio task.